I’m right up there with you on this. I’ll also add, having consistent shapes and colors that represent those notes. I imagine this might have been what you were getting at with:
To the first point, here’s a couple of github threads where they discuss possible changes in the core of Excalidraw, that could one day then come to the Obsidian plugin. If you are interested:
Does anybody know the Post-it Android app by 3M. It allows you to capture your post-it notes board into the app and work on them. It also integrates with Trello and Miro.
I would argue against using markdown simply because it’s not at all a tool for the job and one must avoid the pitfall of being tempted to see very problem as solvable by the same tool just because it is the sole tool available.
Markdown shines as a simple (poorly standardize) format that allows to express basic formatting in text fashion. It comes very short when it comes to standardisation, expressivity (even for text), structure (even for tables) and was simply never designed for anything like connectivity, graphs, being parsed unambiguously, or anything else than simple formatted text.
What’s the added value of using markdown versus just another better human readable but specialized language? The page is not mean’t to be editted in the editor anyway. Pushing ackward concepts into markdown will just lead to supporting exotic and hard to parse syntax anyway, i have no doubt it is doable and perhaps language must be expanded, but selecting the right tool for the job seems to me more important than making a text styling language suddenly expanding into representing highly structured data
I agree that the more and more you try to stretch the limits, the more likely things will start breaking down. But I think there is a difference between enabling completely new functionality with Markdown files (“I want to shoot 4K video and store as MD files in Obsidian!”) and adding new ways of viewing and manipulating our fundamentally textual Markdown content (which is what this thread is mainly about.)
I would love to see a index card / corkboard view in Obsidian. I’ve tried to emulate this behavior in Excalidraw and Kanban, and while both are excellent they aren’t really intended for this kind of visualization/organization.
I just searched the Discord about this earlier and there’s at least one plug-in coming as well as some existing workflows that are moving in that direction.
Heptabase just raised $1.7M in seed funding so there’s definitely a perceived interest in this kind of function.
Wow! Heptabase looks like a baby of Obsidian, mind maps, and Prezi (anyone remember Prezi?)
But: If I remember correctly, Tony Buzan insisted that the branches of mind maps must be capital letter words, not sentence fragments, in order to keep overview and be able to read the idea / concept with one glance, no matter how large the mind map.
In Heptabase I only see a huge amount of tiny text on first glance, and the only memory aide will be space and maybe color coding.
PS: Christin, great to see you here, you were the one that got me to switch from Bear to Obsidian in the first place in our short reddit interactions (my handle is ‘jfhey’). Thanks for that
PPS: I hope you won’t make me switch to another software again (Scrintal looks kind of cool as well btw, similar direction as heptabase).
PPPS: Has anybody taken a look at obsidian markmind plugin? It allows you to watch and even edit your notes as a mindmap.
Heptabase and Scrintal look really cool for sure but I’m way too invested in Obsidian’s ecosystem at this point to want to try to find replacements for all the components and workflows I’ve put into my system. I do have one project I might toss in Heptabase but with the intention of bringing it back to Obsidian when we get something along these lines.
Glad to see you here too! As for Markmind, it’s interesting and I’m glad I bought it but I haven’t found much use for it yet. I’m rather spoiled my MindNode and iThoughts and Markmind just doesn’t have the UX I expect for mind maps. Outlining works decently though. Tables are cool too. My biggest problem, however, is that it’s similar to the Kanban plug, a note is normal or it’s Markmind and you can’t really mix them if you want the more powerful features. I don’t think it’s the solution to lack of a visual interface either.
There may be need a common format, or tools, just like Adobe to turn the PDF into a generic format, requires an easy to read JSON and text files and rendering it on the graph, Excalidraw is very Like, but it is not enough.
If you’ve ever had a garbled text problem, you’ll realize that even if it’s plain text, it’s just a 0/1 binary and it’s still unreadable, but the device you’re using in your environment will guarantee that it’s readable，
The difference with traditional pdf files or XML files is that we need not only to be able to render as png, but also to want it to be modifiable, just like plain text, it is an ongoing project, not a one-time exhibition
Yeah, I can’t wait to get some kind of plugin like Hepta for Obsidian.
Re:Markmind, you can of course use the simple mode which is nothing but a markdown note with headers and lists, but the mindmap features are very limited and you can’t change the headers in the markdown note either without breaking the mindmap structure.
I’m sure you are aware of the ‘trick’ to embed mymindnode as iframe in Obsidian
BTW Zsolt has added a ‘TheBrain’ navigation script for Excalidraw which looks really awesome. Maybe a heptabase-like implementation is around the corner!
(Scrintal looks kind of cool as well btw, similar direction as heptabase).
